


a girlfriend for Christmas

by Blake



Category: ER (TV 1994)
Genre: Bathroom Sex, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:42:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22370473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: Susan lowers her gaze to her chart, but she doesn’t seem to be actually looking at it. “Maybe I should show up wearing a sexy Santa dress or something. But, no. She’d just laugh. Maybe announce that I’m quitting my job and becoming a mechanic. Or-” She cuts herself off with a gasp.Carol flinches away, startled, when Susan suddenly reaches across the desk and rests her cool, bare hand on Carol’s wrist, a light, intentional pressure like she’s appreciating a mass. “What?” Carol asks, too taken aback to come up with specific suspicions.Susan tilts her head apologetically before she’s even said anything. “I could bring home a girlfriend.”
Relationships: Carol Hathaway/Susan Lewis
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	a girlfriend for Christmas

Carol is not in the best of moods. She’s been called “Christmas Carol” by seven patients and three coworkers in the past ten hours. She hasn’t sat down in those ten hours, either, because the ER been weirdly busy for such a snowy Christmas Eve: MVAs, fireplace accidents, and of course the local bunch partaking of a little too much holiday spirit before slipping down the El station stairs and cracking their heads open. The sky turning black by four hasn’t been great for her overall mood, and as far as she can tell, nobody is paying her January rent for Christmas.

“Are you doing anything fun for the holidays, Carol?” Mark asks during a rare quiet moment at the desk. Either he can’t take social cues like the dark bags under Carol’s eyes, or thinks he actually has some single-handed power to improve staff morale.

Carol continues to fill out her labs, sitting deeper in her seat while she still can. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Doug just a few feet away, his head bent over his charts, listening in in that infuriating way he does whenever Carol’s personal life comes up in public spaces, like he’s worried one day she’s just going to announce to the whole ER that Doug Ross is a lousy lay or something. Having an ex at work is the worst. Having men at work is the worst.

“Just the usual,” she mutters, pushing down so hard with her pen that she tears through the paper.

“Oh, are we talking Christmas plans?” Susan slaps a chart down on the desk next to Carol’s. The heavily sarcastic brightness in her voice always makes Carol’s face relax enough to smile. “Anybody want to trade with me?”

“Patient giving you a hard time?” Carol asks, all too aware of the high number of gropey assholes in the building today.

“No, I mean trade Christmas plans.” Susan pinches her smile into one half of her face like she’s tasted something sour but refuses to pout about it.

“That bad, huh?” Mark asks over the skin-crawl-inducing squeaking of his marker on the board.

Susan’s green eyes sparkle like grinchy tinsel when she meets Carol’s eyes, begging for pity. Most of the doctors naturally gather around Carol to gripe about things, like providing free life advice comes with the pink nurses’ uniform. With Susan, it doesn’t feel like an imposition. “Not only do I have to see my psychotic parents, but _also_ my deadbeat sister, _and_ her new junkie boyfriend and god knows who else shows up.”

Silently, Carol takes a peppermint from the secret bowl behind the counter and offers it to Susan, twirling the crinkly plastic between her fingers. “Hey, maybe Junkie Boyfriend will bring a junkie friend.” She feels an honest smile stretch her lips, and the strange release in her bloodstream of making the first non-scathing joke she’s made since she showed up to work before dawn and got vomited on before even getting her scrubs on.

“Hey, I’m not _that_ desperate.” Susan unwraps the candy and pushes it right into the soft pouch of her cheek to keep talking. “It’s just that my sister is _always_ starting drama at holiday events, ever since she was fourteen and put a pack of cigarettes in everybody’s stocking just for shock value. We’re just hostages to whatever cry for attention she’s going to perform every year. That is _when_ she shows up- Actually, you know what? She’s the center of attention even when she doesn’t show up.”

“Hey, at least you have a little excitement besides which cousin messed up the borscht recipe and debate about where her mother went wrong in her parenting.” Carol touches the ends of her dark ringlets, thinking about her extremely traditional mother and all her extremely traditional opinions about Carol’s life. Another year without a doctor husband: that’s what tomorrow will mean for her, in the eyes of her mother.

“That’s just it,” Susan insists, consonants slipping a little around her mint. “I want to _be_ the cousin who messes up the borscht recipe.”

A snicker of laughter bursts past Carol’s closed lips. “No, you don’t.” Susan shakes her head, searching for words, her straight dirty-blond hair slip forward from its vaguely angular style to brush against her soft chin. Carol arches an eyebrow, trying to imagine Susan surrounded by her Ukrainian relatives, struggling to make Kutia in the kitchen like it’s a trauma room.

“Okay, I don’t,” Susan concedes. “I just want to upstage my sister. I know it’s childish, but I think I deserve to be the child for _once_ in my life. I haven’t been the center of attention on Christmas since she was _born_.”

Carol grins brightly and straightens her labs by bouncing the papers on the countertop. “At least you _know_ it’s childish.” It surprises her to realize that this might part of why Susan is generally a more tolerable person than most doctors. She never really thought about it before.

Susan lowers her gaze to her chart, but she doesn’t seem to be actually looking at it. “Maybe I should show up wearing a sexy Santa dress or something. But, no. She’d just laugh. Maybe announce that I’m quitting my job and becoming a mechanic. Or-” She cuts herself off with a gasp.

Carol flinches away, startled, when Susan suddenly reaches across the desk and rests her cool, bare hand on Carol’s wrist, a light, intentional pressure like she’s appreciating a mass. “What?” Carol asks, too taken aback to come up with specific suspicions.

Susan tilts her head apologetically before she’s even said anything. “I could bring home a girlfriend.”

Only Carol’s scoff keeps her jaw from dropping. She blinks up at the florescent lights, orienting herself, because she thinks she’s just been asked to be someone’s fake lesbian girlfriend for Christmas dinner for petty revenge. “Wouldn’t they kind of see through that when they remember you’re not a lesbian?”

Susan’s probably the only person in the ER capable of sincere, hard, delighted laughter. Carol doesn’t understand how she does it, how she keeps some part of her alive and separate from the vomit and blood and shit and tears of grief. Balance between work and life seems like a fairy tale she knows she’s supposed to believe in, but she’s never actually seen it in anyone besides Susan. “Please? As a Christmas gift for me?” Susan asks through her laughter, through the grin of her small white teeth.

Over by the board, Doug is still looking down and pretending not to listen, as obvious as a cat with its ears rotated toward the sound like antennae. Doug never laughs half as sincerely or asks half as sweetly for anything.

Before Carol has a chance to respond, EMTs are wheeling in the MVA they called about ten minutes ago. He’s conscious and complaining, though, so Susan has time to crunch the mint between her teeth and take her time releasing Carol’s wrist before running to catch up with Mark and Doug in the trauma room. “Think about it?” Susan pleads, her fingers still reaching for Carol as she walks backwards. “It could be fun.”

Even as she rolls her eyes, Carol is smiling, despite herself. She heads to Trauma 1 and tries to imagine what it would be like to be able to think about things like Christmas dates while she’s injecting fluids and running tests on a guy who, from the look of it, might need Santa to bring him a prosthetic leg in the morning.

\---

Halfway through Christmas with her mother, Carol starts to suffocate. First, she calls the ER to see if they need another nurse, but apparently, it’s slow enough they can’t justify the holiday pay. Second, she calls the number Susan wrote on her arm in whiteboard marker at the end of her shift last night.

She spends the half-hour train ride rubbing the purple ink off of her forearm, pushing her cold fingers up under the sleeves of her jacket and coat and burning the skin with friction. She laughs distantly at herself as she does it, curious why she’s so set on erasing this one piece of evidence of their lie, as if the fact that they’re _not a couple_ won’t give them away.

She laughs again at the door of Susan’s apartment, amazed at herself for actually showing up. It’s already the third strangest Christmas she’s had, after the two Christmases she spent working twelve-hour shifts in the ER. When she knocks on the door, it sounds like the start of “Jingle Bells,” and she suffers a bizarre impulse to knock out the rest of the song, as if she’s so lost in the role of being someone else that she’s become the kind of person who knocks Christmas songs on the door.

Instead of finishing the song, she just laughs at herself, sliding the hat off her head and airing out her hair between her mittens.

There’s some muffled talking behind the door, and then Susan throws it open, her face pink and less soft-looking in the natural blue winter light filtering in through the hallway window. “Oh, thank god they let you off work early, baby,” Susan says, the authentic-sounding rush of her voice making Carol’s blood run thin with curious excitement.

The only warnings Carol gets are the dark, conspiratorial gleam in Susan’s green eyes and the booze on her breath as she comes closer before she’s suddenly being kissed on the lips, wide and wet and firm.

Susan’s hands on either side of her jaw hold her still while their lips separate, the air between them full of laughter and the warmest thing Carol’s felt all day. Her stomach is doing summersaults of surprise, and part of her thinks Susan should definitely have asked her beforehand if kissing was going to be part of the deal. But her first instinct is laughter, and that has to mean something. She closes her own grin to place a peck on Susan’s lips again, practice and consent all in one.

Someone clears their throat very loudly. Carol looks past Susan’s rolling eyes to the old man in the doorway.

“Hi, I’m Susan’s girlfriend, Carol,” she says, extending her hand, and that’s that.

\---

The sister and the boyfriend have a screaming match in the kitchen during dinner and make out grossly and loudly on the couch while everyone watches _Christmas Vacation_ on TV. Carol can feel the irritation radiating through Susan’s hand, which she has been clutching comfortably tight to all night. Well, it’s the twitching fingers and also the sour-lemon curl deep in Susan’s mouth, covered barely with a superficial smile.

“We need to up the ante,” Carol whispers once Susan’s mom has excused herself to the restroom. Her legs are curled up under her, knees pressed against the sweet warmth of Susan’s thigh. Susan casts her a skeptical, _thanks but don’t bother_ glance before turning back to the electric glow of the TV. But if she had really given up on the cause, why would she still be holding Carol’s hand? “Come on,” Carol hushes through a smile, squeezing Susan’s hand and leaning in close to speak right against her ear. “Let’s get scandalous.”

Susan’s lips are parted in surprise when she turns to look at Carol. She’s so very clearly not used to having someone on her team, someone to support and conspire with her, and Carol can relate. She doesn’t even know what she has in mind, exactly. She just knows she wants to make Susan feel like the center of attention at her family’s lackluster Christmas party.

When the couch sinks under her, signaling the return of Susan’s mother, Carol stands up and squeezes Susan’s hand tight before letting go, trying to broadcast the significance of her leaving as obviously as possible.

Then she waits in the bathroom, inspecting the pink toiletries littered across the sink and investigating the medicine cabinet, curious how thorough a doctor’s parents’ first-aid kit might be.

A few minutes later, Susan comes in without knocking, an apologetic look already on her face. “Sorry to waste your time,” Susan says, shutting the door behind her, “I guess my parents just aren’t as homophobic as I thought.”

“Hey, I think you’ve still got a shot at this.” Carol takes Susan’s hands and backs her up against the towels handing on the door. She lets go just long enough to push the loose strand of Susan’s hair back behind her ear, watching how Susan tracks the movement with her eyes. “Sneaking away to fuck in the bathroom totally trumps bad make-up canoodling in the living room.”

Susan laughs, at least. That’s a win. “All right. How long should we stay in here?”

Carol is making this up as she goes, so she doesn’t have an answer planned out and ready. She keeps telling herself she’s being practical, but she’s not really sure she believes herself. “I dunno, fifteen minutes?”

Susan slumps against the door, feet slipping between Carol’s. The nice hems of her green trousers look so soft against the coarse denim of Carol’s jeans. “Is it obvious I’m a bathroom fuck at the Christmas party virgin?”

Instead of answering, Carol finds herself studying the drape of Susan’s gold-chain necklace across her collarbones and sternum, and the pulse in the pale hollow of her neck. It’s weird, pretending to be dating a woman, putting herself in the shoes of someone who finds women attractive. It doesn’t feel that different; she’s an observant person who notices details about people, and who appreciates the small things that make women objectively attractive. The only thing that’s different is imagining what to do with that information, how to touch, how to act on observations to elicit responses, how to lean into and enjoy the heart-flutter heat of being looked at by another woman.

“They probably haven’t even noticed I’m gone,” Susan groans, looking up at the ceiling and sliding down even further until the insides of their knees are touching.

“So make some noise.” The suggestion comes from somewhere deep within Carol, pure, unchecked inspiration. She watches Susan’s lips open up to laugh before she remembers to laugh, too.

Susan bites the inside of her cheek and kicks Carol’s foot. “You first.” She laughs some more, expectantly.

Carol lets out a low moan. It sounds like she’s suffering from kidney stones, and they both know it. Laughter rings out and echoes in the pink porcelain room. Cresting just on the edge of the wave of laughter, a hot, needy moan breaks out from Susan’s parted mouth.

It hits Carol dangerously low, spreading heat between her legs, and it’s only in this moment that she realizes just how deeply confused she is. She forces out some more laughter, trying to act delighted, since it was her idea to start this.

“ _Ah_!” Susan shouts, half-sigh, half-moan, like she’s seeking something and getting closer. Carol falls silent again, until Susan’s laughing again, covering her mouth and murmuring something about how she can’t believe she’s doing this.

“ _That’s it_ ,” Carol says, fighting her instinct to whisper, because that would defeat the whole purpose. She drifts closer to Susan, who pulls her in with a hand on her waist, too hot and too soft. “Oh, that’s so good, fuck.” She’s trying to think of how she actually sounds during sex, but the other half of that would be that she’s also hearing what Susan actually sounds during sex, and that’s such an intimate thing to share, a vulnerable thing to know about a person. Like knowing how they kiss.

She tries to get a read on Susan’s face; the laughter has tapered off, and she keeps looking down at Carol’s body the way someone looks when they’re attracted to women. She doesn’t know which one of them is making this weird, but they’ve suddenly gone from zero to sixty, approaching the edge of a cliff and still holding hands. It’s a joke, but it’s not, but it’s a joke, and it’s crazy, but Carol wants to kiss her again.

“Do you think they might walk in on us?” she whispers, but she barely gets the words out before Susan’s hand in her hair is bringing her down in deep for a raw, real kiss.

“Better safe than sorry,” Susan murmurs, tongue tracing the shape of Carol’s lip.

The moan Carol lets out echoes in her own head, a reminder that _that’s_ how she sounds during sex. They both laugh again, girlish giggles spilling into the kiss, and Carol’s not really sure what that means, if this is authentic for either of them or if this is a weird roleplay they’ll forget about tomorrow.

But she does know that Susan’s leg is warm, soft, and strong against her, the perfect pressure to grind down against, rubbing through the hard edges inside her own jeans.

“Oh my god, I feel like I’m in high school again.” Susan’s words smear against Carol’s cheek, and try as hard as Carol might, she can’t really hear much sarcasm in them- more curiosity than dismissal.

Carol lowers her head and rests her mouth across Susan’s pulse, the thin skin strangely sweet. “Ah-hah, so you’re _not_ a bathroom fuck virgin.” She slows down her grinding, trying to make her desperation less obvious without giving it up altogether, because the pressure is just _really good_ when her senses are full of Susan’s skin-scent and the grip of Susan’s small hands on her hips.

“Oh no, I am,” Susan assures her, playfully serious as she melts lower, wrapping one ankle around Carol’s, hot where her thighs squeeze tight around Carol’s leg. “Maybe you should change that.”

Carol lifts her head to meet Susan’s eyes, searching carefully for the truth in either or both of them. She pulses wetly against the inside of her jeans when she thinks of going further with Susan, of following through on this and seeing where it goes, hearing more of what Susan sounds like, and smelling the sweat break out on her skin, and figuring out how this might even go.

The pink, vulnerable blush across Susan’s face should scare her away, but instead, it just pulls her in deeper.

\---

When they finally emerge, sweaty and red-faced, everyone else is in the kitchen, yelling about something and completely oblivious to whether lesbian sex just did or did not happen in the bathroom.

“Guess that was a bust, huh?” Carol asks, not _really_ nervous that Susan really was doing everything they just did just to try to steal the spotlight from her sister. She’s pretty sure that they stumbled across something bigger than a convenient fake-date to a Christmas party, even if they haven’t put words to it yet.

Susan’s eyes keep drifting to the mark Carol can feel swelling on her neck. “Yeah, I guess so,” she says, sounding incredibly distracted.

“We should just cut our losses and run.” Carol backs herself up against the wall, making herself available.

Susan nods, stepping in close. “No point in continuing the pretense.”

“Definitely,” Carol agrees, laughter bubbling high and light in her chest as she drags Susan down for a soft, familiar, thrilling kiss. 


End file.
